


Things to Do in the Sengoku Jidai When You're Bored

by Empatheia



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Comedy, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-11
Updated: 2006-05-11
Packaged: 2017-11-08 00:16:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/437009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Empatheia/pseuds/Empatheia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which a lot of rotten fungi learns to fly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things to Do in the Sengoku Jidai When You're Bored

"Kagomeee," Shippou whined. "I want some candy!"

"Don't be so rude, Shippou," she scolded. "I don't have any more, you'll just have to wait until I go home for some more."

"But I neeed it! Waahh!"

The pretty priestess-in-training looked down at him patiently. "I'm sorry, Shippou. I honestly don't have any!"

The little __kitsune_ _ pup slumped visibly. "Play with me, then? I'm bored!"

Kagome sighed. "Sorry, Shippou. I'm studying right now. Maybe later?"

This was not going well. Giving up on his foster mother as an obvious lost case, he turned and scoped the scene. Now, who was most likely to indulge him? Easy. "Sannnggooo!" he cried plaintively. "Play with me!"

But no — the _taijiya_ shook her head regretfully and squatted down to pat him on the head affectionately. "Sorry, Shippou. Miroku and I are going to spar for a while, but I promise I will when we get back."

Shippou stared in disbelief. Even Sango was abandoning him? __That traitor!_ _ He steeled his nerves and pivoted in place towards a tree stump across the firepit. The stump was currently occupied by a sullen scarlet lump who was muttering ill-naturedly under his breath and flexing his claws. Normally, Shippou would have taken that as a nice clear hint to stay well out of reach. But he was _bored._ It was time for the last resort.

"Inuyaaasha!"

"Whaddya want, brat?" the lump said, uncurling into a very bad-tempered silver-haired half-demon. Uneasily, Shippou eyed the uncomfortably sharp claws the hanyou was currently brandishing. Boredom was a harsh mistress.

"Play with me!" he blurted desperately. If this didn't work...

"No."

"Waahhhh! Why won't anybody play with me?" he wailed disconsolately. "I'm so bored!"

"We've all got better things to do," the __hanyou_ _ drawled, sounding just as trapped in a state of stultifying boredom as Shippou was. However, he also showed no signs of wanting to remedy that. Shippou was ready to weep with frustration.

"Inuyasha!" Kagome cried. "Be nice to Shippou!"

"Or you'll what?" Inuyasha's mouth snapped shut as he considered the idiocy of what he'd just said. Kagome was fully capable of putting him in his place, in extremely painful and humiliating ways. "Never mind! Forget I sa..."

"Sit," she said absently, not lifting her head from her history textbook. Inuyasha slammed into the ground facefirst with a crunch, filling his open mouth with slimy-invertebrate infested dirt. Shippou shrieked with laughter, overjoyed at the highly interesting turn of events. That high quickly soured as the spell wore off. The __hanyou_ _ growled threateningly and began to extricate himself from the new crater.

"You little..."

"Eeek!" Shippou shrieked, and bolted into the shadows of the surrounding trees. "Don't let him hurt me, Kagome!"

"Inuyasha, leave Shippou alone."

"Keh." The half-demon, now significantly dirtier and a great deal less dignified, regained his perch on the tree stump and scowled across the fire at Kagome. "I'll kill you tomorrow, Shippou. Right now I don't have the energy to bother."

Shippou felt strangely disappointed by this — even _Inuyasha_ wasn't interested, not even in pounding him into pulp. The little circle of comrades was utterly silent, almost oppressively so. "I'm going to go look for some mushrooms," he said grumpily. "Come save me if I'm not back in three hours."

"Whatever," Inuyasha said, yawning. "Like I care if you get eaten, you little shrimp."

Shippou stuck his tongue out at the brash hanyou and marched off into the woods. _Stupid Inuyasha. Stupid everybody. Why won't anybody play with me? I'm booorred!_

Though it was still a good two hours away from sunset, the woods were dark and silent. He shivered, feeling the little rusty hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. It wouldn't do to return to the campsite without any mushrooms now — Inuyasha would just tease him about being cowardly and he'd never live it down.

_Nope, nothing for it. I just gotta find some mushrooms and head back. Eeee, but it's so creepy here, away from the campfire!_

He scuffled in the damp earth at the foot of trees and peered beneath the underbrush determinedly. To his despair, it seemed that every mushroom in the entire forest had gone into hiding upon hearing him coming. Not a one! Not a single, measly yellowcap or parasol to be found!

"Aaaarrrggghh!" he wailed. "This is _not_ my day!"

"Oi!" a voice cried suddenly from above him.

Shippou launched a good three feet into the air, which was impressive considering that his own total height came to rather less than that. "Aiieee! Kagome! Inuyasha! Somebody save me!"

Derisive laughter. "You're such a baby! I'm not going to hurt you." A slight figure, slim and dressed in baggy clothing, dropped from the branches of the overhanging tree. Tossing a slightly disheveled black braid over its shoulder, the figure addressed him. "Long time no see, fox brat."

"You," Shippou replied nonchalantly while desperately trying to remember their name. He remembered where he'd met her, and had been so traumatized by it that it appeared he'd subconsciously blocked her name. _S something? Senji? Sokan? Sou... sou something. Darn it!_

"'You?'" the figure echoed sarcastically. "Jeez, you don't even remember me, do you?" She stepped into the light and flashed baleful reddish eyes at Shippou.

"I do too! Er... Sou... kai?"

"Souten," she corrected impatiently. "Remember?"

And suddenly, he did. _Oh._ "What are you doing here?" he blurted, and then immediately clapped small hands over his overactive mouth. "Er, I mean... nice to see you?"

"Hmph. I should be asking what _you're_ doing here. You are, after all, on _my_ lands."

"We are?"

"Duh. You are such a dolt."

"Hey!"

"You wanna fight?"

This presented an interesting opportunity. Shippou was bored. Shippou did not want to be alone. Souten wanted to roughhouse.

"Yes!" he cried happily, and immediately threw the first thing that came to hand. Which turned out, amusingly enough, to be an acorn.

"Wow, this is nostalgic," Souten commented as she manifested her trademark hordes of madly giggling magic acorns.

"Not so fast!" Shippou whipped out his counter-attack — equally raucous hordes of shrieking mushrooms. "Ready?"

"Whenever you are!"

Shippou smirked and assumed a solid martial arts stance. "Take this!"

For the next few minutes, the forest became obscured by storms of hurtling small objects as Shippou and the thunder demon girl happily pelted each other with bits of flora and reminisced about their last meeting.

"You've changed your hair," Shippou yelled over the pandemonium of yowling nuts and fungi. "You don't look like an angry bush anymore."

Her two decidedly frizzy bunches of spiky hair were gone, replaced by a sleek black braid identical to her older brother Hiten's.

"You've changed your outfit," she retorted, pointing out the absence of the little leather jerkin he'd always worn, and the addition of an deep orange haori. "You don't look like a travelling rag merchant anymore."

"Thanks!"

"Now you just look like a malformed pumpkin."

"I take it back. Eat fungus!"

"Oof! Ew, gross!"

"Gotcha," Shippou gloated.

"Don't get too excited! I'm not done yet!"

A few minutes later, they collapsed in a contented heap of demon and miscellaneous vegetative detritus.

"That was fun," Shippou gasped.

"I win!" she proclaimed, struggling to catch her breath.

"You do not."

"Do too!"

"Since when?"

"You fell over first!"

Shippou drew an outraged breath. "I fell over because _you_ looked like you were going to pass out! I was being considerate!"

"Doesn't matter. And I was _not_ going to pass out."

"Cheater."

"Dolt."

A few more minutes passed in companionable almost-silence as they slowly regained their exhausted energies.

"Oi, Souten," Shippou said at last.

"Mmmrrrfff?"

"You wanna go back and colour? Kagome brought me a whole new box of crayons, there's sixty-four different colours in this one!"

Souten's reddish eyes widened and she bit her lip. Shippou instantly understood that she really, really wanted to say yes, but was far too proud to let him have the upper hand. He grinned widely. There were ways around that...

"Of course, I'll understand if you don't want to watch my vastly superior artistic skills crush yours into the dirt. Avoiding such embarassment is perfectly understandable..."

"Stop that, you sound like a pompous dork when you try to talk like a daiyoukai _._ And your skills are _not_ 'vastly superior' to mine. I can draw better than you blindfolded and using my feet."

Shippou snorted. "Yeah, right. Big talk, but can you back it up?"

Souten froze, an expression of half-joyous wonderment on her face. It seemed she'd suddenly comprehended the loophole Shippou was offering her. "Of course," she snapped haughtily to cover her happiness, and began to stalk off in a completely random-looking direction.

"Oi, where're you going?"

She arched an eyebrow at him. "To your campsite, of course!"

_It's that way? ...Oh._

What was it about her that could make him feel like an utter idiot without her having to say a word? Girls! They were all alike! Shippou let out what he thought was a manly harrumph, though in reality it sounded more like a strangled badger coughing.

"Hey Shippou, when do you turn seventy-seven?"

He crinkled his brow. That was a decidedly odd question. "I'm only thirty-four, so not for a while yet," he replied. "Why do you ask?"

She heaved a long-suffering sigh. "Seventy-seven is the age of maturity, didn't you know? Then we can get married!"

Shippou stopped dead in his tracks and desperately tried to keep his eyeballs in his sockets and his mouth shut. He only partially succeeded, with very unfortunate results. One of his eyes bulged outwards maniacally, while the other was tightly shut, and his conflicted lips formed a mangled grimace. "Urk?" he squeaked.

"Of course!" she sang, hands clasped together. "Shippoouu, we're _meant_ to be together! It's _destiny!_ "

He stared at her in absolute horror, and contemplated ritual suicideon the eve of his seventy-seventh birthday. Would history remember him honourably, he wondered in horror, if he killed himself in a horrible and gory way rather than marry a highly eligible and landed demon princess? They stood that way for a long, long second, and he decided he didn't care if the high council declared him anathema and disowned him from the youkairanks posthumously. Seppukuit would be.

Then, shockingly, she burst out into hysterical, gasping laughter and collapsed to roll in the moss. Tears ran down her face as she kicked the air frantically. "Oh, Shippou, you should have _seen_ your face," she howled. "That was... that was..." She gave up on finishing the sentence and elected to laugh harder. She was turning red in the face.

Shippou was non-plussed. "Not funny," he grumbled.

"Oh!" she gasped, clutching her gut. "Priceless! I'll have to remember that line for future use!"

"Say it too often and I won't know the difference if you mean it one day!" he warned.

"Like I'd ever _actually_ marry you!" she snorted, pulling herself off the ground and proudly dusting off the bits of foliage that were stuck to her clothing.

Shippou relaxed. "Good! 'Cause I'm _never_ getting married," he announced. "Girls are icky."

"Boys are ickier!"

He stuck his tongue out at her. "Race you back to the camp!"

"Try not to be late! And don't get lost!" she called as she bolted in the random-looking direction. He followed her, little legs pistoning furiously. She was taller than him by a few inches, and was using those inches ruthlessly.

"Slowpoke!"

" _Girl!"_

"You say that like it's an insult, _boy_!" she taunted, easily keeping several paces ahead of him.

"I hope you're not planning on tagging along with us for too long!" By which, of course, Shippou meant _I hope you're staying for a while._

"No, probably not, you guys are boring!" 

Shippou was fairly sure that translated to _I'll stay if you'll feed me!_

The days ahead suddenly looked bright and promising to Shippou. Boredom grumbled bad-naturedly and skulked off to sulk in a dark corner, recognizing that it was being unceremoniously evicted. It was not impressed, but what was it to do? Souten was a singularily anti-boring sort of person.

Shippou grinned and ran a little harder.


End file.
